


The Acolyte

by elisende



Category: Baldur's Gate
Genre: Choking, F/M, Face Slapping, Light Angst, Light BDSM, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:08:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27992016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisende/pseuds/elisende
Summary: When the wild druid from Kagha's fantasies spirits her away, she exults in achieving her greatest desire.  But for such freedom, a price must be paid.
Relationships: Halsin (Baldur's Gate)/Kagha
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	The Acolyte

Most people assumed Kagha was born into this life. As though she’d slipped from the earth’s muddy womb to run, unshod, through the pathless forest with feathers in her hair, singing hymns to the Treefather in Wild Elvish under the light of the waxing moon. 

Most people were fools.

She did not used to believe so. Kagha had been a biddable girl, and once a pliant bride. She came from a good and ancient family, a line descended from noble Eladrin. Her family words were _Ta selun tor’selu_ , Highest of the high. 

When they thought no one could hear, polishing the family silver in the kitchen alcove, the servants whispered the words to each other and giggled. But Kagha heard, and made sure those servant girls were put out on their arses without the day’s pay. 

Her family lived in Alaghôn, a once important city that teemed with once important elven families. The glory days were long gone but their patina remained; the city stood upon a honeycomb of ancient tombs and palaces, full of relics of a long forgotten age, when dragons reigned and druids wove wild magic in the surrounding hills.

Mischance and her incurable curiosity had led Kagha to just such a buried crypt: a druid shrine. The figures on the walls had danced under the guttering light of her torch, making the mosaics come alive. Of elf and beast and man all engaged in an ecstatic dance under the shelter of a great oak, from which a deity smiled. 

What captivated her most was the central figure, a wild-haired elf, larger than life. Half bear, even, depicted mid-transformation, his fingers dipped into the open mouth a half-elven acolyte. His eyes direct, frank, challenging. Vine tattoos twined up his cheeks, lapping his sensuous lower lip.

She’d discovered the tomb on her wedding night and when the bloom of her marriage faded over the coming months, almost as quickly as the snowy blossom of the dogwoods that proliferated around Alaghôn’s silent streets, she found herself spending most nights in the shrine, under the gaze of the druid, and in her loneliness and misery she fancied that he spoke to her, that she was his acolyte, that he slipped his fingers into her mouth--and more. Much more.

Kagha recognized him immediately when the same druid came into her husband’s hall, bowed his head to them, drank their wine. She trembled to see him in the flesh. She was not gratified, or even pleased. For she knew the power of her will had drawn him to her, and that had frightened her. 

He had come, he said, to ask a boon. The key to a lost temple under the foundations of their home. He spoke in pretty Elvish and he had good manners but he was a wild beast next to her cultured, urbane husband. Seeing them standing next to each other, she realized her past was standing next to her future. 

Seducing the druid was harder than she thought. For he, too, was strong willed. She relished the challenge and where her husband was accommodating, gentle, and predictable, her new lover--for her lover he would be--was stubborn, wild, and prone to rages, like the bear within. Deploying all of her guile and her considerable beauty, she only barely managed to convince the druid to take her back to his grove to take the trials of a novice. 

She left a single branch of dogwood on her husband’s pillow, its last white petals barely clinging to it. He was sophisticated, and not unintelligent. He would understand.

In his grove, the druid Halsin was unguarded, easier to approach. Her aptitude stunned him, and her unyielding passion captivated him. After the passing of three seasons she claimed him in a grove of flowering almond trees, planted by some forgotten woodsman. He kissed her breasts as he came, sighing her name, and on his lips, it had sounded like a great tree cracking down its center and tumbling down. _Kagha_. Her joy in that moment, her triumph, had been unequaled since. Halsin had a poor memory but Kagha’s was very good. She could remember the highest point of her life with perfect, painful clarity.

They made love in waterfalls, under the stars in wild glades and secluded bowers, or sometimes even in the caves around the grove. Halsin made no secret of their affair in the Circle, and, almost as gratifying as having him was the knowledge among the others that he was hers. Their deference, edged with jealousy. It was important to Kagha that they knew she was better, separate. _Ta selun tor’selu_.

And then, like a towering oak struck down by a sudden clap of lightning, it had all ended.

It ended on a cool autumn day when there wasn’t much to do but lie together. They rambled out early that morning, he in his bear form, she shivering in little but a filmy shift. By that time--and through her tireless toil--the forest and wild scrub around the grove had been cleared of the goblin filth that had still infested the land when she joined the Circle. But now the wood and shore belonged to the beasts and birds, warded by the druids--as it should be.

They found their way to the river and he caught a salmon for them to share in his paws, tossing it to her still flapping. That was their game: it wriggled and slapped her arms as she caught it, screaming. He shifted back to his elven form, laughing until tears gleamed at the corner of his eyes. 

Why had they always found that so funny? she later wondered. Her past self was like a stranger to her.

With his hunting knife he cut her a bit of the flesh and fed it to her, raw. Watching her as she ate it. His eyes seemed to shift colors like the trees in the wind. He liked to see her like this, untamed and even feral. Even then, she was distantly aware how it was a salve to his ego, that he’d transformed a high elven matron of Alaghôn to a wild girl with her hair running wild down her back, eating raw fish from the end of his blade. Wasn’t he the master druid?

He discarded the fish and fell upon her by the water’s edge, hands plunging into her hair, and her nose filled with his scent, cedar and smoke and something sweet, like forest berries, or perhaps the wildflower honey he loved to eat. Their kisses were lingering, needy; up until the very end, they’d never been able to get enough of each other. Her hand wandered to his cock to find him already hard, his hips lifted to her touch and he sighed into her ear. 

Kagha broke away with a laugh and ran past him to dive into the river. Her shift clung to her breasts, hips, and the mound between her legs; she made sure to show it all to him from the high, flat rocks that stood like a platform in the center of the river. With a growl he leapt into the freezing water, clambering up onto the rocks with such grace a bear of an elf could muster. She laughed again, was still laughing when he climbed onto her and took her breast in his hand, thumbing her nipple through the wet cloth. Her laughter became a gasp that he swallowed with another deep kiss, this one more forceful. 

This was the other game they liked to play. 

He shoved her onto her back, pulling her head back by her wet hair to expose her neck and claim it with harsh kisses. His other hand found the damp mound of her sex and grabbed it, fingers roughly stroking her lips through the cloth. She hissed and grimly he smiled, his eyes not meeting hers, all his attention focused on her body. 

Impatient with the damp fabric, he ripped her shift up to the hip, exposing her to the chilly air. His rough fingers found her already wet; he circled and flicked her clit with his thumb as he extended a finger, then two inside of her--not gently. She gasped and her hands found his cock again, clenching it so punishingly tight it made him groan. 

“Do you want me?” she demanded, her voice low but steady. When he didn’t answer immediately, she loosened her grip, slid her hands down his shaft, teasing the tip with her thumb when she reached it. 

He sighed. “Yes.”

“Then take me.” A crack as she slapped his cheek hard with the back of her hand, its outline raised in red on his left cheek. He looked angry--truly angry--but that was part of their game, too. With a snarl, he ripped off what remained of her shift and positioned himself between her legs, even as he took her breast in his mouth, lashing her nipple with his tongue, sucking it as harshly and avidly as marrow from a bone. 

_Crack_. She landed another blow. Now he roared as he grabbed her hips, his hands rough on her skin and grip so tight it would leave bruises that would outlast them, outlast what they had together. She would see them tomorrow and weep.

But now, there was only pleasure. He plowed into her, and the world seemed to sharpen, become brighter. The pain from the tiny pebbles and ridges in the rocks that scraped her back. The sound of the water rushing all around them. The glorious sense of fullness between her legs, the sweet throb of her pussy as she took all of him in.

His grimace made a mask of his face: he looked almost ugly, older than his five centuries. She smiled, overcome by a sense of triumph as he continued to thrust. She traced a hand down his muscled and scarred chest, then turned her caress into a rebuke with her sharp nails. They drew blood. He glowered above her like an angry god. She lifted her hips from the rocks, taking him deeper, giving herself the pleasure she required of him.

“You know what I want,” she said. “Give it to me.”

His big hands circled her neck and squeezed. She choked and gasped, smiling defiantly. If she had the breath, she might have laughed. She’d learned how to get him to squeeze tighter. And he did, and stars swam overhead as every sensation below became enhanced. She felt every raw inch of him, each thrust pounding like a wave against the shore, a relentless onslaught. It was the full expression and experience of his power that she lost herself in. 

As always, her climax came first, and forcefully. Her hips bucked against his grip and she screamed soundlessly, for she had no more breath. The stars in her vision brightened as she lost control, until she couldn’t even see his face anymore. She sensed him coming, like a stormcloud loosing its rain from a great distance. The hands around her neck slackened and gasped, vision returning. They never held each other, after. Kagha hated being held; it felt too much like being captured.

Instead they lay side by side, fingertips barely touching. Kagha watched the rills of water that parted around the rocks, listened to the birdsong, and felt the contentment she was never to experience again.

*

When they returned to the grove, even the air seemed somehow poisoned--too quiet, pregnant with some unsavory possibility. 

Kagha and Halsin exchanged a look; he sensed it too. At least they were dressed. They had plucked some clothes from a line by the river; a careless novice who’d left the washing unattended in the sun had saved them from an awkward return to the grove.

_“Kagha! My love!”_

She whipped around to the source of the voice, which was coming from a great tree at the edge of the grove. 

The idiot. Her husband, the scion of a great house and a lord of Alaghôn, had perched in the sacred sycamore and covered himself in some kind of disgusting ointment. He wore a massive set of antlers on his head, tied together with some string, only they wouldn’t stay up and he kept having to reposition them on his head. He was stark naked. 

She buried her face in her hands.

Beside her, Halsin sucked in his breath. “Is that…?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice harsher than she meant it to be. “It’s Talarion.”

“He looks rather different,” Halsin said mildly. A novice ran up to them, closely followed by Aelar, another high elf who had recently joined their circle from the High Forest.

“Master Halsin, there is a problem,” Aelar said breathlessly. 

“I had noticed,” he replied, a smile playing on his lips. 

“He refuses to leave until,” the elf gulped, glancing sideways at her, “Until he speaks with Kagha. He says…” 

“Well, get on with it,” Halsin said, smile broadening. Damn him, he was enjoying this. Kagha had never been so mortified. It was somehow worse than if she herself was naked and covered in filth in the sacred tree. The idea of being connected with such a pathetic figure filled her with shame. And rage.

As though he heard her thoughts, Talarion screamed her name again from the tree, desperation reaching new heights.

“The sacred balance of this place has been disturbed,” the novice said, speaking for the first time. A drow girl with a saucy look about the eyes that Kagha disliked immensely.

“Balance has a way of restoring itself,” Halsin said. “I don’t think the circle is in danger of irreparable harm. You were saying, druid?”

Aelar gulped again. “He... says he is Kagha’s husband, Master Halsin.”

A putrid silence followed this, one she felt obliged to fill. “And so he is not. I am done with him. I am with Halsin now.”

The novice smirked, though she tried to hide her face behind her hand. _Cunt,_ Kagha thought viciously.

“Nevertheless, I don’t think he’ll respond to anyone else,” Halsin said. His tone was measured, reasonable--conciliatory even. That angered as much as the words themselves. 

“He is a fool and not my responsibility,” she said. “I’m not going to placate a child who cannot accept--”

“ _O sun of my summer sky! O sweet dawn of my heart!_ ” The verses stirred some vague memory in her. But mostly they served to enrage her further. The idiot, what could he be thinking? 

“Oh Silvanus’s mercy,” Halsin said. “He’s reciting Daldorian rhyme now.” 

“He attacked everyone else who tried to come near,” Aelar said. “One of the novices has a broken arm. This elf’s magic is actually quite advanced. But since he’s Kagha’s, er--well, as he knows Kagha we didn’t want to hurt him.”

“You have done well, Aelar.” He turned to her, merriment still dancing in his eyes. She could spit at him. “Kagha, you know what you must do.”

She swore an oath that made the slut of a drow gasp and began to ascend the tree, all the way to its crown nearly a hundred feet in the air. The sticky honeydew of aphids made her fingers tacky as she climbed. 

Below, the Circle watched. She felt every stare as though it was a lance in her side. She imagined she could hear their thoughts. That she was pathetic, unworthy, ridiculous. 

“ _I, a simple shepherd under the numberless stars, sing the song of love to the vault of heaven, that the gods may hear my prayers!_ ”

How had she ever cared for such a fool? As she came nearer, the noxious smell intensified. He had indeed covered himself in excrement, for reasons beyond anyone’s comprehension. 

Finally, she reached the branch where he paced. He seemed shorter than she remembered, though in comparison with Halsin, he was bound to seem small. His fine blond hair was caked with mud and shit.

“Talarion,” she said, sharply. Perhaps his name would bring him back to his senses. “What in the hells are you doing?”

“Kagha, my love,” he said. He reached for her, arms spread wide to embrace her. She twisted away with an exclamation of disgust.

“You are filthy! How I could have been fool enough to marry you is an utter mystery to me. I am done with you, do you understand?”

He hung his head and began to sob, crumpling to his hands and knees on the branch. “Losing you has broken me. Have you no pity for one you swore an oath to cherish and love for eternity?”

 _Gods_. With a mighty sigh, Kagha sat next to him on the branch. The stench was overwhelming.

“I am wretched without you, Kagha,” he whispered.

“You need to move on,” she said, not unkindly. She patted his mucky leg. “I am not coming back with you, if that’s what you hoped for.”

“No,” he said thickly. “I know how bloody stubborn you can be. I truly know you, far better than you think.”

She straightened her back. Everyone always thought they knew her so well.

“You are a wild thing. Out where the wild things belong. I knew you wouldn’t come back,” he continued, “I suppose I just wanted to see your face.”

“Well,” she said. “You’ve seen it.”

“Maybe I was hoping the druids would kill me. Or I’d be eaten by a bear or some poetic end like that.”

She winced. There wasn’t anything poetic about being devoured by a bear, particularly. They were not great killers and were apt to eat you while you were still alive. But of course, Talarion wouldn’t know that. The only truths he knew were written in hexameter verse.

“I never meant much of anything to you, did I?”

When she didn’t answer, he laughed jaggedly.

Silence stretched out between them. Finally, she glanced over to see him staring at her with his impossibly blue eyes. He was handsome, she realized. Just at the moment the thought surfaced in her mind he slipped from the tree and hit the earth with a wet thud.

No one knew then or afterward if it was an accident or intentional, though it seemed everyone in the Circle had their theories. Some swore to their dying days that Kagha had pushed him.

Kagha, who had been looking into his eyes at the moment he fell--or jumped--could not guess one way or another. In a way, she reflected, it didn’t really matter. The outcome was the same.

Below, the grove rang with screams and Halsin rushed over to Talarion’s body. But such a fall, from such a height--there was nothing the master druid could do. His body was shattered, brains spilling onto the muddy earth.

*

It all ended, after that. There was no tearful scene, no accusations. Halsin wasn’t disposed to theatrics and Kagha had enough of the grove’s attention. When he withdrew from her, after that day, she didn’t pursue him. She refused to humble herself.

She vanished into the forest for a time, a season of reckoning. 

No one knew what happened to the proud elf in that bitter winter, its ferocity remarked upon even a century later. But she came back from the wilderness hardened and impenetrable. A honed edge. 

And she became ever more comfortable with the lie: that this was what she had always wanted.


End file.
